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Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts

Day: January 14, 2004

  • Movie: Big Fish

    Eleven days, we got out to see Big Fish, the new movie directed by Tim Burton. Had enough fantasy to suit Burton (Beetlejuice, anyone?), but always in the service of the story. I really enjoyed this movie, and I had the refreshing experience of knowing very little about it before I went to see it.…

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  • David Ogilvy quotes

    I’m not an advertising maven, but Ogilvy is cited as the genius of the field, at least for the last half of the 20th century. Here’s a list of quotes from Ogilvy. I liked this one: Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people…

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  • It’s your problem. And their…

    Tim Bray posits the “Two Laws of Explanation. I’ll let you go there to read the short essay, but the two laws complement each other, underlining the reality that it’s incumbent on the person describing something new to do a good job with the explanation, while it’s the responsibility of the person learning about something…

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  • Explaining the passer rating

    Richard Sandomir at the New York Times often covers sports broadcasting. He must have been as perplexed as the rest of us — or just unusually perceptive — as the passer rating (aka QB rating) of Peyton Manning was announced as ‘perfect’ at 158.3. That incredibly arbitrary number comes from a formula devised by a…

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  • Useful tip: Mail.app on Panther,…

    Environment: MacOS X 10.3.2 and Mail.app 1.3.2. Experience: Junk mail filtering stops working, and when manually classifying mail as Junk, Mail.app crashes. Workaround: Quit Mail.app, delete the ~/Library/Mail/LSMMap2 file, then relaunch Mail.app. Source: Post to Macintouch. This has happened to me several times on the laptop, and now on the desktop. I just now tried…

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